


If It Takes All Summer

by Blue_Skidoo



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Drabble, Earthborn (Mass Effect), Gen, Tenth Street Reds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 19:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5260586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Skidoo/pseuds/Blue_Skidoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts out small, running messages for food and somewhere dry to sleep at night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If It Takes All Summer

It starts out small, running messages for food and somewhere dry to sleep at night. Sure, those messages might be to and from drug dealers, and maybe she’ll be tossed out of bed at 1 am because the feds have found their latest hideout and _damnit it’s time to move **now** , Shepard_. But life with the Tenth Street Reds is significantly easier than before - it’s better than scrounging through garbage and falling asleep in libraries, department stores, anywhere she can rest her head. It’s better than being hungry.

She isn’t the only kid in the Reds, not by a longshot. The faces come and go but Shepard thinks there must be twenty of them at any given time. For a while it’s fun to spend her time off with the others but it’s not long before the children she ran with her first year stop coming by, one by one. She stops learning the names of the new kids and they just call her Shepard, her last name the only thing her parents left her with.

She thinks about what her parents were like, after particularly bad days. When the speed of her hands catches up to her feet the Reds stop sending her out to run messages and start her on petty theft - picking pockets, lifting merchandise. She fantasizes that one day she’ll be caught by a mark and they’ll turn and recognize her; their little Shepard, the child they gave away.

She will stop thinking about them, in time.

 

* * *

 

Five years and Shepard is still with the Reds. Now she’s the one that gives messages to filth-covered kids for their dealers, catalogs the older kid’s hauls. She spends her nights jumping rival gangs that have strayed too far into Reds’ territory and now she knows many, many different ways to break a man’s bones, how to shrug off assailants twice her size. She learns when a fight is lost and when to cut and run; she pays for her lessons in inches of skin and ounces of blood. 

The city’s lights may glitter and daze tourists and worse, colonist tourists, but that life is far, far away for Shepard. It might as well be a different planet.

Shepard is fifteen and still hungry, all the time. She’s had more drugs in her system than people twice her age and it does nothing now - it’s never enough. She sees junkies barely older than herself, sand-blasted and begging for another hit, and wonders when it happened to them, when it will happen to her.

Fifteen is too old to be running on the streets with the kids and she knows it won’t be long before she’s asked to join the Reds, _really_ join the Reds.

 

* * *

 

The day she turns sixteen, she enlists.

  



End file.
